An enterprise computing environment is an organization of any size that uses computers and operates a local area network connected to the Internet. Generally, an enterprise computing environment includes a number of client computing devices and one or more servers. Various types of security products, including but not limited to firewall products, anti-malware products, intrusion detection/prevention products, reputation service products, and the like are available to protect client- and server-based operating systems and other applications of the enterprise computing environment from security threats.
One type of security threat is malware, which includes but is not limited to viruses, Trojan horses, worms, spyware, rootkits, phishing attacks, and other malicious software that generally originates from a malicious presence on the Internet, such as a hacker's Web site. One common way hackers use to compromise client computing devices is by seducing users to download and execute malware from what appear to be legitimate Web sites.
Individual security products often operate in isolation, providing localized security solutions for enterprise computing environments. Deploying and maintaining a wide variety of individual security products is generally expensive and complicated. In addition, individual security products can suffer from various performance problems such as: high rates of false-positives or false-negatives; limited use of automatic responses; overly localized responses; delayed responses; limited access to contextual data desirable to assess security threats; and static data collection policies that result in the collection or retention of too little or too much data.
This Background is provided to introduce a brief context for the Summary and Detailed Description that follow. This Background is not intended to be an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter nor be viewed as limiting the claimed subject matter to implementations that solve any or all of the disadvantages or problems presented above.